I am pleased to announce that the Early Fall Tournament will be produced again for this fall, this time with the assistance of a narrowly-defined set of Virginians and others. I will be head-editing, with subject editing assistance from Richard Yu and James Lasker. This year's writing team will consist of these editors, plus Alex Fregeau (formerly of Illinois) and Vasa Clarke, Eric Xu, and Jack Mehr (all of the University of Virginia). The set will be available for mirrors starting in late September or early October.

This year's EFT set will be written with the same philosophy as last year's set, and will target the same difficulty - roughly in between ACF Fall and ACF Regionals, leaning ever so slightly towards the latter. This tournament will be appropriate for strong collegiate novices, experienced high school players, while aiming to provide a meaningful experience to experienced collegiate players through fresh clues on core academic topics.

For college teams, all in-person United States sites of this tournament will be completely closed. High schoolers may play, and can play on chimera teams with permission, but permission will only be granted if they are unable to play with their school team (teammate unwillingness to attend is a fine reason). Exceptions to these rules may be granted with the permission of the head editor. Non-US sites are free to set their own policies for tournament attendance, and we are open to this set being used for independent open mirrors.

The distribution of this year's tournament will be slightly altered from last year's distribution:

In response to low conversion numbers on, due partly to writers and partly to the audience's knowledge level, the amount of pure philosophy will be reduced in favor of a more "thought" style approach, ala This Tournament Is A Crime. Also similarly to TTIAC, this tournament will be using a genre-based literature distribution.

This tournament will consist of 15 packets - 13 main packets and two set aside for finals. Like last year, the final packets will be somewhat harder than the main tournament packets.

The mirror fee for this tournament will be a flat $40 for each team. There will be no field-size discounts for hosts this year. Hosts are free to set the main tournament fee as they please, but are required to provide buzzer discounts of at least $5 and travel discounts of at least $10 for teams traveling 200 or more miles.

Post reserved for a list of mirrors. Like last year, we plan on having a playtest mirror on Skype, which will be completely open.

This year, we would like to see an open mirror of this tournament in the United Kingdom, as well as a standard "closed" mirror. This open mirror would ideally be run before the "closed" UK site, so as to allow experienced UK players to staff the latter.

Updated eligibility rules - permission to play may be granted with the head editor's consent, depending on the circumstance. I definitely won't be allowing any tournament-dominating open teams to play or anything like that, but if your program is small I'm willing to grant some wiggle room.